Many incarnations

Lewry built his first video guitar in 2006. The design has come a long way since then, going through numerous incarnations.

The model pictured here contains a Toshiba laptop which Lewry ordered new, disassembled, and fit inside a custom guitar body. He quickly came to realize that putting an entire laptop inside a guitar made it uncomfortably heavy, and modified the design.

Lightening up

The second version of the video guitar also used a laptop screen mounted inside the body. Each guitar Lewry has designed has become lighter with the use of new materials. The current version is down to 9 pounds.

Custom made

All of the guitar bodies are custom made at Visionary Instruments. Because the design has evolved so quickly, each guitar is made straight through from start to finish. Prices for the guitars range from around $2,500 to $3,000.

The insides

Using the custom circuit board, Lewry designed a system in which a standard Piezo pickup--normally used on an acoustic guitar--reconfigures the sound using the custom analog tone PCB (printed circuit board) and mirrors the standard humbucking pickups to create a rich, warm tone.

Lewry's training

Lewry does not have formal training in instrument building or engineering, but he did study in Dharamshala, India, with a Tibetan man named Kunga, who hand-built a traditional instrument called the dramyin. (Lewry and Kunga are pictured together in the photo frame at the bottom left of the image.)

Lewry learned to craft instruments with hand tools and applied this knowledge to guitars before setting out with his video guitar designs.

The newest guitar

Lewry's newest video guitar, seen here, is an edgier design geared toward heavy metal. Two videos loaded on the instrument are a crawling bug video and clips from King Kong. Weighing in at about 9 pounds, the guitar is similar in weight to Fender Strats and Gibson Les Paul guitars.

This isn't the end of innovation for Ben Lewry and Visionary Instruments. While so much technological change has come to musical instruments in the past few decades, most of it has come in the hardware accompanying instruments. The sounds are affected through changes in amplifiers and manipulated with pedals.

Lewry sees a new dynamic emerging in guitar playing, where custom tones and sounds are created right in the guitar with MIDI, and the guitar itself becomes a visual focus of the performance.